“we” are. I wondered, too, what and whom “we” love. Neither an equality of interdependence nor an evenness of cooperation seemed to underlie this country’s human relations. Not in the internment of Japanese Americans just seven years before Leopold’s and my father’s books appeared. Nor in the de facto and de jure segregation that so many Americans took for granted as the second half of the twentieth century began.
If viewed as a trophic or food strategy, one group of people acting upon another by imposing values, definitions, or violence could be seen as deriving part of its energy by consuming or controlling the energies of others. Or so I thought in an ecology course where definitions of parasitism and predator-prey dynamics seemed disturbingly close to some human relations.
Calling morality prescriptive rather than descriptive of behavior, one commentary on Leopold’s land ethic argued that “moral consciousness is expanding more rapidly now than ever before.” Despite continued failings in moral practice, the author cited as evidence emergent moral ideals like civil rights, human rights, and women’s liberation. “Most educated people today,” he added, “pay lip service at least to the ethical precept that all members of the human species, regardless of race, creed, or national origin, are endowed with certain fundamental rights which it is wrong not to respect.” Well-meaning acquaintances have also told me that civil rights laws and a growing attention to human rights now address root causes of human ills. They’ve suggested that racism, class conflict, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia could well become isolated aberrations or vestiges of the way things used to be. Just as slavery, dispossession, and internment became things of the past, they say, so can these. “Don’t you know we’re becoming a post-racial society?”
What have I missed?
Perhaps the sphere of ethical relevancy has expanded outward among “educated people” to embrace race, gender, and class in theory if not practice. But who lives in theory, or benefits from lip service? Without backing belief or means, “rights” become limited and limiting to legal form and process rather than a moral imperative extending from heart and spirit. It still matters to me that more than three score years after the Supreme Court ruled segregation in American public schools unconstitutional, separate and unequal education remains the embedded norm.
A great many things have changed since 1949. Much has not.
With origins from all parts of the world, “we the people” inherit and share the contradictions of this nation’s growth. We carry this history within us, the past becoming present in what we think and do, in who we think we are. It informs our senses of place on Earth and our ties with each other.
A child born today enters a world of rapid and extensive change. The list is often repeated: Human population continues to grow. Ecosystems around the world have never before been so fragmented or degraded, resulting in great losses to the diversity of life. Coal, petroleum, and other fossil hydrocarbons, once abundant and seemingly cheap “resources,” literally fueled industrial revolutions and the mechanization of food production. And because of this fossil-fuel economy, greenhouse gas levels continue to climb, exceeding the highest atmospheric concentrations since our species evolved.
The pace and degree of such environmental changes are unprecedented in human history. Yet the embedded systems and norms behind them in the United States, the most energy-consumptive nation, are not. Their deep roots allowed and continue to amplify fragmented ways of seeing, valuing, and using nature, as well as human beings.
Consider the “ecological footprint.” Its estimate can mask how exploitations of land and of people are intertwined. Quantifying the area of productive land and water needed to provide ecosystem “services” or resources that are used (like clean water, food, fuel), and wastes then generated, gives but a partial measure of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity. And by this measure alone humanity’s footprint already exceeds Earth’s ecological limits.
But American prosperity and progress have come at great human costs, too. Forced removals of the continent’s Native peoples yielded land to newcomers from Europe and their descendants. The new republic’s economy grew upon a foundation of industrial agriculture built and powered by enslaved workers. Consuming other people’s labor, dispossessing other people of land and life connection to it, devaluing human rights, and diminishing one’s community, autonomy, and health—these are not just events of the past. In a globalizing world, American agribusiness giants have profited from the products of enslaved labor in Brazil at a seemingly safe moral distance. And far too many degraded environments in the United States are also citizens’ homes—in nearly all states with hazardous waste facilities, high percentages of people of color and the economically poor live, and die, next to those sites. Witness, too, farm workers in pesticide-laden fields whose health and lives are rarely recognized as a cost of producing cheap food.
A wiser measure of the ecological footprint would include people, or at least their labor. It might factor in the losses of relationships with land or home, losses of self-determination, and losses of health or life. What if the footprint measured, over time, on whom and what the nation’s foot has trod—that is, who has paid for prosperity?
ALIEN LAND. LAND ethic. What is the distance between them? As a young adult I felt little integrity or wholeness of living because so much of my acquired knowledge came from inculcated divisions. Only slowly did I come to see that I would remain complicit in my own diminishment unless I stepped out of the separate trap: me from you, us from them, brown skin from depigmented skin, relations among people from relations with the land.
Aldo Leopold explained, in A Sand County Almanac, that he “purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written.’” Rather than being fixed, an ethic must evolve “in the minds of a thinking community.” As he wrote toward his tentative expression of possibility and necessity, Leopold was concerned not just about the primacy of utilitarian values in the United States, but also the inadequacies of dis-integrated thinking and living. Specialization encouraged fragmented recordings and understandings of human experience. He worried as well that the goals and definitions of science dealt “almost exclusively with the creation and exercise of power.” An unfinished manuscript and notes, published posthumously as the essay “Conservation,” offer his developing insights: “We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations the important thing is not to achieve, but to strive.”
The scope of America’s “thinking community” remains narrow. A democratic dream of individual liberties and rights hasn’t yet contributed to a “co-ordinated whole”—whether human, biotic, or the land. Danger lies in equating theory with practice, or ideal with committed action, as personal responsibility and respect for others, and for the land, can still be lost to lip service, disingenuous manners, and legislated gestures to an ideal.
Consider the words of a biologist writing on an environmental ethic today. “Our troubles,” E. O. Wilson observes in The Diversity of Life, “arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to be. The primary cause of this intellectual failure is ignorance of our origins.” “Humanity is part of nature,” he continues, “a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.” Perhaps danger lies most basically in not recognizing who and what we are.
• • •
I pored through my father’s shelves after reading Alien Land that first year at Princeton, concentrating on books he’d marked. On Being Negro in America. Black Skin, White Masks. The Fire Next Time. Anger, and Beyond. These
